Tag: ex-pat

Without realizing it, he had grown to hate everything that he once so desperately missed. The home he thought he was at long last returning to proved to be nothing more than a rude awakening to the fact that this was no longer where he belonged.

The whole bed beneath me jerked violently back and forth, five feet maybe ten each time, the mattress bouncing and shaking more and more with each thrust, the dimly-lit walls wiggling as if they were made of rubber, and after I had flung myself onto my feet and into a pair of pants and ran desperately to the front door, I was surprised to find when I stepped into the brightness of a freshly-ignited dawn that life seemed to be continuing on as usual, the most dedicated (and presumably high-paid) of the infamous Japanese businessmen already whizzing by in their cars at what must have been four thirty or five in the morning.
Despite the evident lack of damage, and although the five floors of apartments above hadn’t fallen in on me and my own ground-floor living quarters like I had so genuinely expected, I decided right then and there that I did not like earthquakes, and that maybe it was time to get the hell out of Japan.